silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
Greets, yo. Still not feeling all that great, but now I have a weekend to get better. Hopefully I don't have to cancel on a social engagement, but if I continue on this path, which it looks like I will, I'm invoking the "Friends don't infect Friends" rule and staying in bed. Or maybe the earthquake that happened while I was still asleep threw me further out of whack.

By the way, did everyone catch that Turd Blossom is going to ignore another Congressional subpoena, claiming the executive privilege of the last administrator as the justification on why he doesn't have to go? Yeah. I think that one's going over like a lead balloon. And, despite his appeal to the current President to continue to give him immunity, I think this is going to end in a contempt citation and possibly his arrest for the same. Sorry, Fox, your correspondent will be sitting for a while until he decides to testify.

Plus, as cash flows into companies from TARP and other funds, they're paying out executive bonuses. Luckily, once he heard of it, President Obama called it "the height of irresponsibility" and promised to make things work better. The NY Attorney General might be looking to have some bonuses returned, because of how gauche it is to pay performance bonuses to executives that ran the company down enough that they needed bailouts. Did we mention there's a recession going on?

In Iraq, hey, look, audits! And not just for Iraq, but for Afghanistan, too. Their conclusions? It's a mess in Afghanistan, and reconstruction in Iraq is goign to get a little screwy, because of the whole lack of capital and cheap oil prices.

the latest statue in Tikrit is a shoe, replacing the statue of Saddam in a strange sort of way, and giving praise to the person who threw both of his shoes at the former administrator. The artist insists the work is not political. With elections upcoming in Iraq the residents of Mosul may be more concerned about security rather than footwear. As are some of the U.S. troops, with the army recalling body armor currently rated as unsafe by the Inspector General, based on the possibility that the armor was not tested properly.

Perhaps causing a small cheer among liberals and the anti-war, Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq will not be renewed for the upcoming year. This is possibly both a repudiation of Blackwater, who has a few incidents of shooting civilians to its discredit, and growing confidence that Iraqi police and military forces can handle the job. To its credit, Blackwater says that they will be gone within 72 hours if the State Department tells them to pack it up.

A one-day strike in France attempted to generate more support for the ordinary worker, but it looks as to have been of limited effect, and the government didn't spring to any sort of action afterward.

Domestically, a judge of the military tribunals has refused to honor President Obama's request that the trials be suspended, the President signed executive orders aimed at leveling the playing field between unions and employers, considering the previous administration's stance too much in favor of employers, in addition to signing into law the Lilly Ledbetter-named bill as his first law of his Presidency, although breaking a campaign promise about putting it up and making it available for public comment before signing it, and he apparently likes the Steelers in the padded rugby game on Sunday.

Here's something to help out the idea of "green jobs" as actual stimulus - there are more jobs currently in creating wind power than there are in coal power. To the comment crew, however, that's nice, but otherwise unuseful, if not downright misleading numbers. On the matter of the actual stimulus bill, instead of the aura of harmony and unity, some very partisan comments come out after the passage of the House bill, which could be expected, considering zero House Republicans voted for the measure. Additionally, a provision in the bill that requires iron and steel for infrastructure projects to be produced in the United States is raising protectionist hackles.

Following on a story from a few days ago, the mother who gave birth to eight already has six children at home. Which raises a whole different host of questions like, "What's someone with six children already undergoing fertility treatments for?" as well as the questions of logistics, now expanded to fourteen instead of eight children.

new claims in the case of Governor Palin's church burning down. According to WND, it was not only arson, but a murder attempt. That by itself should get plenty of people investigating, yet... still nothing from the MSM. And despite claims that the MSM is sitting on it because the culprits could be liberals, I think that if this really were a murder attempt, the MSM would be quite interested in it. So what gives, huh? The General blames child witches.

A gent stabbed his girlfriend with a knife, claiming that he was going to take back the breast implants that he paid for her to have. The implants were damaged in the assault. What are the odds that this was part of a bad breakup or acrimonious divorce?

The Boy Scouts of America, championed as environmental stewards and conservationists, have been selling land and taking profits from clearcut or high-impact logging operations, often to raise revenues that weren't coming in because of the policy the BSA has on who can join their ranks.

A comparison not worth missing - empty housing units in 2008 were almost five times the number of homeless in 2007. So there's space to house all the homeless, but there's not necessarily will to do it. Probably like how there's more than enough food to feed everyone, but not the will to do it, either.

Opinion time, where you can get enough heat and spice to make sure that your ramen tastes a little different.

Larry Elder opes the festivities by... complaining that the MSM will never, ever, ever, say anything bad about their BFF, President Obama, downplaying his big, scary, things and not paying attention to others. Kimberley Strassel sees a stealth campaign to nationalize health care, stuck in the SCHIP expansions and the stimulus bill and The WSJ compains about possible incentives for Hollywood, likely to be used as an example of what the WSJ believes are the dire consequences of abandoning leadership to Nancy Pelosi, based on how Republican suggestions and tax cuts were apparently shed from the stimulus bill as more Democratic spending was piled on. (And they're claiming not to be fooled that social engagements are actual bipartisanship.) Because the President and/or the Democratic leadership passed the nakedly partisan bill, Peggy Noonan says, they missed a golden opportunity to pass a good bill, one that had both parties' input, and one that recognized the new era, instead of thinking that the old ways of spending would work.

As we consider spending money that we don't really have, Ulrich Volz suggests that members of the G-20 create a fund that will help developing an smaller countries get credit when they need it. The WSJ advises against something like this, preferring that the U.S. spur entrepreneurship and private citizens getting loans instead of governments.

George Schultz says we need to think really long-term about this if we want to avoid bigger problems down the road, perhaps in entitlements instead of housing.

The WSJ is aiming for Chris Dodd to release documents that he said he would release regarding his own Countrywide scandal, even as he demands that Treasury get money back that was used to pay out bonuses. Good for the goose, good for the gander.

Hans von Spakovsky revisits a contentious issue during the election process, and concludes that those states that required voters to show identification did just fine for turnout, because it's patently easy for anyone to obtain a government-issued identification, and turnout was bigger in the voter-ID states, too. Uh, apples and oranges on that last one?

And at the end, David Keene thinks that turning over the names of Iraqis who interpret for American soldiers is signing their death warrants by making them terror targets. This is supposed to be the new, secure Iraq. If you think the Iraqi forces can't protect someone from terror because they helped the United States out, say so. Don't just complain that a contractor is doing their government-required duty in turning over names for tax purposes.

In technology, gold mined from sewage sludge, which reminds me of a bit about someone falling into a pile of excrement and somehow coming up smelling like thorny flowers, watching two galaxies collide makes for some interesting pictures, as the black hole at the center of the collision sucks up whatever it can. There's also using the analogy of a bathtub overflowing to describe the effects of climate change, with the implication that most people don't recognize there's a problem until the tub overflows, the Army's continued interest in mind-controlled insects, finding methods to make carbon graphene work in electronics, so that it can be conductor, insulator, and potentially everything else in between, meaning possible organic computing, which would work well with nerve interfaces between machines and organic components, learning a bit more about how the brain controls parasites and infections in its own backyard, preparation for a possible volcano eruption in Alaska, and a browser plug in that semantically analyzes and deconstructs the links you click on during a search, then provides new links on the search page based on what you clicked on, so that as you resolve ambiguity, the results become more tailored to what you're looking for.

At the end for tonight, whisky-byproducts become power. Bottoms up? That, and some ways of getting something for nothing, some of which may be small, others which may be potentially huge.

And yes, Fox picked up the Narnia franchise, so there will be more movies.

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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